How Basel changed the world by Matthias Buschle & Daniel Hagmann

Author:Matthias Buschle & Daniel Hagmann
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Christoph Merian Verlag
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Romantic

Matriarchy.

Johann Jakob

Bachofen and

mother right

Walter Benjamin, one of the key figures in 20 th century social philosophy and cultural sciences, wrote the following about the Basel scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen (1818 – 1887): “There are such things as scientific prophecies. They are easily distinguishable from scientific predictions, which latter exactly foresee events in the natural order, for example, or in the economic order. Scientific prophecies deserve this name when a more or less pronounced sense of things to come inspires research which, in itself, hardly goes beyond the general concerns of science. Hence, these prophecies slumber in specialized studies inaccessible to the public at large, and most of their authors are not even regarded as forerunners – either in their own eyes or in those of posterity. Rarely, and belatedly, does fame come to them, as has just happened with Bachofen.”

Mother Right – a work and its impact. Benjamin’s text, written between summer 1934 and January 1935, still offers an apt assessment of Bachofen’s work and its impact. Scientific prophecy, i.e., an often vague and not necessarily correct forecast, recognition of a problem and the as yet incomplete investigation of same, in short, the role of provider of propositions – that was Bachofen’s achievement, his contribution to the universal history of ideas.

A Contribution to the History of the Development of Humanity, The Female Natural Principle in the Fields of Religion and Law, The Position of Women in the Primeval History of the Human Race, The Essence of Women’s Rights – these were just some of the ideas for the title of Bachofen’s book. The treatise finally appeared in 1861 under the heading Mother Right. An investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World.

This almost one-thousand-page opus garnered both recognition and severe criticism from the most diverse schools of thought, disciplines and university faculties: from ethnology, which for a long time counted the book among its classics, to psychoanalysis, Marxism, neo-paganism, esotericism and feminism. Traces of his thought are also to be found in literature. In its day, Mother Right shook the foundations of the scientific world, putting forward a new view of cultural history and historical analysis which could never again be ignored.

However, and Walter Benjamin was right again here, the book belongs to a special category of publication: “It has been known for some time that the most read books are seldom the ones that exert the most fruitful influence.” Or, as a contemporary critic put it: “… many scholars will leaf through it, some individuals will look at it more closely; but surely only very few will go through the whole of it, as this reviewer has done.”

The Mother Right of an independent Basel scholar. Who was this man who inspired and challenged such diverse great intellectuals as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Mann, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, Erich Fromm, Carl Gustav Jung and Wilhelm Reich?

Bachofen was born in Basel in 1815. His family owned a silk-ribbon factory and was one of the richest in the city.

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